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Harry, I Hardly Knew Ye

For a while I half wondered if some swine flu had wrought epidermal havoc in barnyards near and far. Why all the chatter about Hogwarts?

And Muggles? I hadn’t a clue. Even when the knowledge caught up with me — it was bound to, because Harry Potter’s popularity rivaled God’s, and his merchandising was more aggressive — I put no stock in it. Having taken a pass on Potter, I was sticking to my guns, or perhaps I should say wands.

On Friday the final Potter movie, an adaptation of the final Potter book, opens. I’m guessing you’ve heard. It’s a big moment for the reverent, evangelical legions of his worshipers worldwide.

But it’s also a big moment for nonbelievers like me. With the Potter juggernaut finally grinding to a halt, we’re no longer left with the odd sensation — by turns isolating and liberating, stippled with doubt and suffused with defiance — of standing conspicuously apart from a cultural phenomenon that so many embrace. It’s the twilight of that particular tyranny.

All of you have been there, on the outside of some mass-market craze or niche obsession that seemingly two of every three people you know won’t shut up about, their exuberance a sort of reprimand for what you’re missing.

Maybe you never dipped into the “Star Wars” series, the “Star Trek” canon or anything galactic. Maybe you skipped “Seinfeld,” like the rebelling friend of mine who dismissed it as “the intelligent person’s ballpark wave,” or Jonathan Franzen, who demanded more patience than critics let on. Maybe you never bothered with Radiohead and then Vampire Weekend; in-line skates and then Uggs; Napster and then Facebook; the iPhone and then the iPad.

There are all these commitment crossroads, where you sign up or opt out, and in this marketing-saturated era of ours, they seem to arrive more frequently and noisily, a function of the velocity with which passions ping around a digital universe.

The fervor with which others latch onto a new enthusiasm makes you triply conscious of your own decision not to, so that even if your choice reflects only the limits of time, budget or energy, you treat it as a declaration of independence. You are what you’re not.

I’m not a Potter person. I flirted with becoming one, because the wee wizard presented an easy way to bond with my young nieces and nephews, but then I remembered that I had ice cream and iTunes gift certificates for that.

Photo

Frank BruniCredit
Earl Wilson/The New York Times

I do not watch “Mad Men” and took great nonconformist pride in that until I did watch “The Killing” — and realized I’d gotten the short end of the AMC network’s stick.

When I canvassed my intimates, I confirmed that each is also acutely aware of potential fixations unfed.

My friend T. is not a Stieg Larsson person, and insists that even a few months ago he still believed “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” was a neo-punk band, but I’m reasonably sure he’s just showing off.

And my friend M. has not become an adherent of SoulCycle, the New York indoor cycling cult, a resistance that’s notable because she has tried every other group exercise known to womankind and falls squarely within the regimen’s target demographic (35 to 55, affluent, apoplectic about the advent of cellulite). At a certain point a girl simply doesn’t have another sweaty fad in her.

I predict she’ll cave, because just as grief has its Kübler-Ross progression, there can be stages of opting out:

Sanctimony. “People are reading ‘Freedom’ only so they can say they did. I’m no literary lemming.”

Wavering. “My friend’s iPhone does have an app that can identify Orion in the night sky. ...”

Boxed Set. “I give in. I’ve got no big plans for the Labor Day weekend. Might as well watch a few seasons of ‘The Wire.’ ”

That’s the thing: you can always wait out the phenomenon, see if it shows enduring merit, separate the wheat from the “Jersey Shore,” and opt in belatedly.

In the meantime, you can cheat. With the bombardment of references to the obsession du jour comes the ability to be fluent — should you care — in something you haven’t actually experienced.

My friend J. persuasively faked fandom of “Lost,” thus evading censure from genuinely addicted peers, and I have repeatedly passed myself off as a “Sopranos” savant, on the basis of only four episodes. I watched none of the finale, though I produced very strongly articulated opinions about it.

As for Potter, I saw 10 minutes of one of the movies, and can’t recall if it involved a goblet of fire, a deathly hallow or neither. Hogwarts was mentioned, so I’m now up to speed. It’s like Exeter, but with a different kind of spelling test.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on July 14, 2011, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Harry, I Hardly Knew Ye. Today's Paper|Subscribe